How To Cure Laziness And Accomplish More Than Ever

Looking for some answers on how to cure laziness? I’ve been feeling a little lazy recently and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because daylight savings makes everything dark and depressing by 5:30pm. That’s probably it. Over the past week, I’ve been waking up around 6:30am instead of my usual 6am to rock this world. Meanwhile, I find myself taking 30-45 minute naps after lunch or afternoon tennis. Shhh, don’t tell anybody.

As an entrepreneur now, nobody tells me what to do. Even though I’m used to working double-digit hour days, I can be as lazy as the best of them. My “work four hours a day, make $200,000 a year” challenge might be hurting my work ethic because I could be taking working four hours a day too literally. In order to work only four hours a day and make $200,000, I’ve first got to work much longer to set up the foundation!

When I posted in the Yakezie Forums, “How Long Do You Think You Can Maintain Traffic Without Posting?“, I wanted to get a discussion going on quality vs. quantity of posts to get the best return on effort. What I realized a couple days later is that I’m partly looking for shortcuts! I wanted to get some advice or some evidence from people who were able to bring their posting way down and still maintain a similar traffic level. Meanwhile, I’m too afraid to test out the theory on Financial Samurai because my posting queue is getting out of hand and I don’t want to risk my traffic going down!

CURE LAZINESS BY WORKING WHILE OTHERS ARE PLAYING

As we enter the winter holidays, it’s so easy to slack off, get fat, and do nothing. At work, this is precisely the wrong time to take it easy because the 4th quarter is when promotions and bonuses are determined. The holidays are also when managers determine who to fire! Now is the time to cure laziness and work your hardest. You need to be the most visible if you don’t want to be thrown onto the streets. If you do, of course you can read my book on how to profitably quit your job.

After realizing I wanted to take the easy route in blogging, I decided to challenge myself and others to write massive amounts of content instead. The challenge I threw out simply states to write at least 5,000 words of content a week from now until the end of the year. The 5,000 words can be written in various ways e.g. one 5,000 word post, five 1,000 word posts, three 1,500 word posts with one 500 word post, and so forth. To give you an idea of how much 5,000 words is, this post is 905 words long. Hence, I’d have to write at least six posts of this length a week!

I currently write about 4,000-4,500 words a week given all my articles on Financial Samurai are over 1,000 words long. Google loves meatier posts and my traffic has surged as a result. Whenever a disgruntled blogger tells me I’m so lucky to have such traffic, I ask him/her to join me in writing longer and more frequent posts. Each time I ask, I get no response! The answer is simply due to the laziness I feel right now. Instead of letting laziness sweep over me like a cream puff blanky, I plan to keep my schedule and write an additional 1,000 word post every week until the new year.

Every professional blogger knows that revenue is a function of traffic. The holidays are slower months for internet users overall, but that doesn’t have to be the case for individual sites. Every site’s potential readership base is in the millions a day, yet most of us only receive a microscopic fraction of that. The only way we can improve our traffic is to write more interesting posts that get picked up by larger media outlets, social media, and search engines.

FIGHT LAZINESS AND ACCOMPLISH MORE BY DOING A COMPLETE 180

The first step to cure laziness and accomplishing more than ever before is to recognize your faults. Once you realize you are being lazy, the second step is to punish yourself! Laziness leads to self-pity, which leads to blaming others for your problems. We can’t have any of that if you want to be successful in anything you do!

Let’s say you are supposed to work out three times a week for one hour each time, but a silly thing like work gets in the way of your health. You’ve got to now publicly challenge yourself to work out three times a week for two hours each time! Or, you can get a group together to workout five times a week for an hour each session. The same thing goes for studying a language, practicing an instrument, learning a sport, or building a business. You’ve got to make it to those 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert.

Make a challenge to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. Make it public so that if you fail, you are going to be completely embarrassed. Whatever you do in life, know that there is always going to be someone who is ready to take you out due to their motivation, hunger, tenacity, and perseverance to succeed.

There is so much wealth out there for the taking. Being lazy does not get you there!

STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT

If your blog is getting good traffic, I encourage you to find great products out there that fit with your content that you use as well. I’ve become an “authority affiliate” in Personal Capital and Motif Investing because I consult with them in their office every week. No other blogger has the same access.

* Personal Capital Review - A Sit Down With The CEO – This is my Personal Capital review post I wrote after sitting down with the CEO, COO, and VP of Marketing for two hours at their HQ. Because it is unique, it has done a great job in search. It’s thoroughly and insightful, unlike other review posts where the author doesn’t even use the product!

* Motif Investing Review: The ETF Killer? - Another meaty review post I wrote after sitting down with 50 Motif Investing employees in engineering, research, marketing, and the CEO. The review is extremely thorough, and I absolutely love their value proposition of letting individuals become their own fund managers for cheap.

* Prosper P2P Performance Review - Prosper is also based here in San Francisco, and I wrote about my returns after waiting two years to see how things panned out. Most other review posts just slap together something immediately.

All three review posts rank very highly in Google, and so they should. I am an authority affiliate who has actually spent hours sitting down with the very people who work at the companies I review. For Personal Capital, I’ve literally worked in their SF and Redwood City Offices for over 1,500 hours from Nov 2013 – Feb 2015. For Motif Investing, I’ve spent about 200 hours so for in their offices in San Mateo. And for Prosper, I’ve had multiple lunches with their marketing people in San Francisco.

Financial Samurai is the founder of the Yakezie Network, the web's largest Personal Finance and Lifestyle Blog Network. Through continuing education and hard work, Sam believes everyone is able to achieve financial independence and give back to the community with abundance. Together we'll slice through money's mysteries! http://www.Yakezie.com, http://www.FinancialSamurai.com

If you liked this post, subscribe to Untemplater's feed via RSS or EMAIL to get instant updates when new content is published.

I just read an article about the “average” person. And frankly everyone is pretty much average compared to and your goals and how you choose to tackle them. Many make excuses about money, time, and all of sorts. If you want it you will find a way to get it done. I agree that the time change made me a little lazy. A I think its human nature to try and find the shortcuts to get what we want. Its like how can I make 200k working just 4hrs a day. The goal is always more for less.

Sometimes I think when we start looking for shortcuts and we start falling into more and more laziness, that we’ve put too much on our plate. Our heads start shutting down (more naps! Less motivation!) and we start looking for shortcuts. I think actually you should see if you can do less. Not in the shortcut way, but in the quitting way. Not saying to be a quitter exactly, well, actually, yes I am, lol. We’re human and can only do so much. Cross a couple things off your list of jobs/hobbies/things you do, so you can do good quality, nonshortcut work with what’s left!

Oh man. I was busy a month ago but compared to right now I was slacking. My work load and stress levels have doubled this month with several huge projects and I can’t afford to get lazy. I’ve got so many people depending on me that I can’t help but feel motivated and work late. That said it is hard to maintain the intensity and I am approaching burn out. But I’m going to have to fight it off because it’s going to be crazy for about another 3-6 months. I’m using the weekends to unwind as much as I can and delegating some tasks.

You do way more than the average person Sam so don’t feel bad taking a nap when you’re tired and benefit from one. You have great focusing skills so you can so a lot more in four hours than most people. I was trying to figure out a problem at work yesterday on my own that was taking me way too long so I had to ask for help and then my efficiency started to get better. The important thing is to recognize when we’re wasting time taking too long at something so we can get help and improve our efficiencies. Working 4 hours efficiently beats working 8 hours inefficiently any day!

I always had trouble with the the label “lazy”! I think that when there is something you are interested in, you suddenly have energy to do it. So is it laziness when you do not do those other things or is it you just want to do it. I think it is the latter. With me, it is cleaning out the garage or some other task I do not want to do.

I go through phases of being more or less productive. I haven’t gotten much in the way of everything done this month. But late last month, I was writing twice as many posts as I normally do, to queue of a guest posting series I started. I’ve not found that I have much success trying to fight unproductive spells. When I’m in the zone, I can pump out a 500-600 word post in half an hour. When I’m in a dip like I’ve been, that same post takes close to two hours.

Sam, I was thinking about this today and decided to write a post about something I’ve been feeling some passion about and that is the diverse reactions to the presidential re-election of President Obama. I’m finding any lazy spurts I’m getting are starting to get cured by my newly forming passion as I really discover my philosophical and political views in the world and share these.

I think there is a direct tie to opportunity and laziness/effort. The more effort I put in, the more opportunities seem to materialize. So I just focus on knowing that opportunity comes with effort.